The Burning Chambers: A Thrilling Epic of Love and Conspiracy from the No. 1 Bestselling Author (The Joubert Family Chronicles)

The last Kate Mosse book I read was "The Winter Ghosts" and to say I was frankly underwhelmed is an understatement, I went so far as to suggest there might even be two Kate Mosses, the one who wrote the brilliant "Labyrinth" and "Sepulchre" books, and the one who's name appeared on the cover of "The Winter Ghosts". I may even have suggested that I had finished with Kate Mosse, so when The Memsahib's genteel ladies of Farnham book club chose "The City of Tears" as their read, somewhat bizarrely as it's the sequel to "The Burning Chambers", she was cautious. However, not having read the first book in this series the Memsahib tucked into a back-to-back read, and persuaded by her praise I reluctantly cracked open "The Burning Chambers" expecting to be disappointed.But I wasn't, and I'm pleased to say Kate Mosse is back to form. "The Burning Chambers" is good, albeit lighter-weight and without the time-slip complexities of the "Languedoc trilogy" [which I enjoyed] but still with historical context, action, romance, drama, tension, and a few twists and turns along the way.So why only four stars? Well firstly it's a bit too long weighing in at 605 pages, that's probably about 100 pages too many and a bit of editing wouldn't have gone amiss cutting out some of the unnecessary descriptive verbage; secondly perhaps some of the coincidences are just a bit too conveniently contrived, but most importantly it disappointingly lacks the complexity I had expected and hoped for from Mosse, and that's why on balance it's only four stars.But I will be back for "The City of Tears" and any further instalments that take us forward to this book's disconnected out of place and time opening that for now at least, appears to have nothing what so ever to do with the Joubert story.PS If you enjoyed Mosse's "Languedoc Trilogy" you might like C.J. Sansom's "Shardlake" series, but do read them in order.

Great book. I really enjoyed it and found it hard to put down.Interesting glimpse into live in Europe in the middle ages. About the time of the Tudors this starts with.Turbulent, troubling times.

I’ve read a lot about Kate Mosse, but never read anything BY her. She pops up a lot on quiz shows, radio, literary festivals, talking about women’s fiction and is generally an attractive and articulate panellist. Reading about her fiction genre did raise some warning lights for me, though. Historical fiction – I don’t dislike it, and enjoy some very much, but am chary of it and jib if it goes anywhere near Mills & Boon/Georgette Heyer/Barbara Cartland territory. I’m hopeless at supernatural/gothic (just can’t suspend my disbelief, apart from The Woman in Black, Turn of the Screw (of course) and a slightly different take by Kingsley Amis called the Green Man). Oh, and apparently Kate Mosse is the queen of the timeslip novels. I view these with deep suspicion, as unless very skilfully handled they just seem to be clunky insertions of different stories, using very heavy handed tropes to link them. I don’t go up tall buildings voluntarily as I hate heights, so why would I embrace reading novels that don’t appeal to me?However, when Amazon offered me a cheapie Kindle version of her new series “The Burning Chambers”, I thought, “why not?” Better to have an opinion based on having read something than assume you won’t like it. I carefully read all the preamble (when authors list characters, best you take care & read them to avoid later confusion) and the historical blurb. Ken Follett lists his characters, and by golly, he needs to – Ms Mosse’s cast list was minute compared to his. I noted it was about Huguenots & the ensuing French Civil war in the 16th Century and based around Carcassonne, where the author has a house. So off I went, starting for no apparent reason in South Africa in the 1860’s where a random un-named woman is attacked, seemingly for some family papers, whilst reading gravestones in a Huguenot graveyard. She is left for dead. We hear absolutely nothing more about her, but I deduced an early warning “unique family characteristic” had been flagged up (tall) and that the papers would feature later.Once I started reading, I kept thinking, “but I’ve read something like this fairly recently” – it was indeed Ken Follett’s “Column of Fire”, the third of his Kingsbridge trilogy (I astonished myself by rather enjoying the first one about the Cathedral, after which it all went a bit downhill). Amidst the cast of thousands is, yes, a Huguenot bookseller and his feisty daughter. Never mind, I kept going with this one until I came across the first paragraph of intensely cliched banality. Whoa, I thought, this woman was meant to be good! Did I see her describe her work as “chick-lit with A levels?” All I can say is if I had employed the lazy similes I kept coming across in this book in my A-level essays, my English teacher would have beaten me round the head with them. Suffice it to say that all scars are livid, the sky is always forget-me-not blue (indeed every description of blue things uses the forget-me-not as comparison; there might have been one “cerulean”, but forget-me-not was the blue colour of choice. The hero’s red hair is “the colour of a fox’s brush” and the frost always tips the grass with silver. Of course, once on cliché alert, you spot them all the time – it becomes a sort of hobby. And I was not let down. Then, the crowning moment – the “unique family characteristic” was revealed – different coloured eyes for our heroine. Oh no, I moaned to myself, not that one, that’s right up there with the silver streak in the black hair. Two pages on and the baddie priest revealed – yes – a silver streak in his black hair. At this point I nearly lost the will to live, but staggered on through the ever increasing body count.If you are going to employ cliched similes, at least space them out a bit. Baddie Blanche had hair (inevitably) “as black as a raven’s wing”. (Oh, and eyebrows liked arched crescents) – a page or two later on, the child Alis also had hair as black as, etc. It was long, convoluted and only the cliché spotting kept me going. The plot pointers were so obvious, that you’d have to be very dense not to work out where it was going. It was a bit more challenging working out who’d make it to the end of the book.It ended reasonably happily, with a certain amount of ends tied up, but ominously, as our heroine was serene in the knowledge that tomorrow was another (lovely) day, it was nearing the eve of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and naturally a number of her nearest and dearest were going up to Paris for the festival. If I hadn’t pushed on and read the introduction to the next novel in the series, the opening pages/chapter would have been utterly pointless. I don’t think I’ll be going there. I know this all sounds really sneery, but I was expecting it to be much better. I can’t see a man reading it, targeting a female audience as it does. Frankly, it’s Ken Follett with less sex and more clichés.